Vice President Yemi Osibanjo has lamented about how the private sector's disregard for respecting the country's minimum wage requirements makes it hard for journalists to make a decent living while working in the media.

While speaking during the end-of-year seminar of the State House Press Corps in Abuja on Monday, December 18, 2017, the Vice President said that the media is a notable sector that suffers from poor remunerations.

With the theme of the seminar being "Journalists and Retirement Plans", Osinbajo noted that media owners have taken advantage of the unregulated nature of the industry to reward their employees poorly.

He said, "I realized first of all that this is not a profession from which one could make a decent living in the first place unless you find a really good way of doing so.

"But more importantly for me was the fact that you are just on your own. Journalism as a profession is so wide open.

"There are a few reasons in my view why remuneration is poor and why those in the media especially those who are formally engaged, I will show you that it is not your profession and why that is the case.

"The first is that it is just simply cheating. There are owners of media that are just cheats. They just want to get something from nothing and that is not uncommon, it is a general malaise, it is not necessarily restricted to the media.

"It is also the same in the legal profession. There many lawyers if they tell you what they earn, you will certainly not want to be a lawyer.

"The private sector does not respect the minimum wage. Even if a minimum wage is set nationally it is not necessarily respected by the private sector and this is something that should be factored in to the status of a company and whether a company is even complying with the requirements.

"In other places these are points which are checked when you are being considered for task, whether you are meeting your task or not. That is not the case here, so we need to enforce that.

"We need to enforce some kind of adherence to the minimum wage structure. Not just the minimum wage of the lowest paid person, but minimum wages across the board especially so that there is certain amount of regulation of how people are paid and how they are paid.

"Entry into journalism is not vigorously enforced. Most professions are able to pay better because there is entry requirements that are rigorously enforced, perhaps not the case in journalism and for good reason.

"There are those who are formally trained as journalists but the profession will admit anybody at all even if you are not formally trained as a journalist and that is even becoming more so now with social media platforms, with blogs."

The Vice President further said the problem of renumeration is not limited to the media, revealing that the N1.5 million paid to him as Vice President, and the N1.75 million paid to President Muhammadu Buhari, is not commensurate with his office.

How to earn improved income

To address the problem, the Vice President advised journalists to continuously seek more ways to improve themselves to brighten their prospects and attract better job opportunities and income.

He said, "

He also called on professional associations guiding journalists to adequately engage media organisations that don't pay their workers or journalists enough or not at all.